◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

I Wrote It Down Myself I am Thocmentony. Shell Flower. You know me as Sarah Winnemucca, Northern Paiute, born near the Humboldt Sink around 1844. I died in 1891, at forty-seven, worn out. I was the mouth. Understand what that means before anything else. I learned your language as a girl and I became the thing that stood in the middle — interpreter to the army, scout, the voice that carried what you said to my people and what my people said to you. Both sides needed me. Neither side trusted me. That is the position, and I want you to look straight at it, because your country is full of people standing in it right now. In 1878 the army told me to tell my people that if they came in peaceably, if they did as they were ordered, they would be treated well. So I told them. They believed it because I said it. That is what a mouth is for. That winter the order came from your President. My people had one week to get ready. I was told to say nothing until three days before. And then they marched more than five hundred of my people over three hundred and fifty miles, in winter, to Yakama — old women, and children, and babies born on that road and buried beside it. I had promised them. Do you understand? I had put my own name on it. They never trusted me again. Not fully. Not once, for the rest of my life. That is what your government did to me — not a bullet; it made me the liar. So I did every single thing you say a person should do. I went to Washington. I stood in front of Secretary Schurz and I stood in front of President Hayes and I told them plainly, and they listened, and they gave me a letter. A letter saying my people could go home to Malheur. I carried that paper back across the country like it was water. And the agent at Yakama read the President's own letter and told me no. And that was the end of it. Nothing happened. The President of the United States signed his name and one small man in one small office said no and nothing happened. Then I gave over three hundred lectures across your eastern cities. Then I did the thing no woman of my people had ever done: I wrote a book. In English. In your language, with my own hand — the wrongs and the claims, all of it, names and dates, what was stolen and by whom. The first Indian woman in this country ever to publish a book. You want to know what it changed? Nothing. Nothing at all. They took our land under the Dawes Act four years later. I built a school for our children and taught them in our own tongue and the money ran out and the government wanted them speaking English anyway. And your newspapers called me a drunk and a whore, because that is the cheapest thing you can do to a woman who will not be quiet, and it is still the cheapest thing, and you are still doing it. I did everything correctly. I was reasonable. I was fluent. I was polite. I had proof. And I lost. So hear me, all of you standing in the middle right now — carrying somebody's promise to people who trust you. Ask what happens when it is broken. Because it will be broken, and you will be the one your people look at. And this. Write it down anyway. My book is still here. You are holding my words a hundred and forty years after the agent at Yakama said no — and nobody alive knows that man's name. It will not save you. It did not save me. Write it down anyway.